Feature
Capital gains
by Dave Hansford
Can Wellington beat London to become the world’s first carbon-neutral “green capital”?
Wellington will soon be the capital of everything. Not content with being the Mayor of “Creative Wellington Innovation Capital”, Kerry Prendergast is talking about nothing less than global domination.
“I can see Wellington City becoming the first ‘green capital’ in the world,” she declared this month, announcing a carbon-neutral vision for the city. “The Mayor of London is aiming for that, too, but I think we’ll beat them to it.”
It’s an ambitious claim – the sort of bombast you might expect in the run-up to a mayoral election.
Every morning, nearly three million people ride the London tube. Over a million more catch a double-decker bus, either clean diesel, hybrid or prototype fuel cell. Those who still insist on driving their SUVs pay £25 a day in emissions/congestion charges for the privilege. Measures like that have prompted some Londoners to buy an electric car, cash in their 100 percent tax break, park for free and plug into free charging facilities while they work. Still others take advantage of free bicycles.
None of which fazes Prendergast. She says Wellington is topographically and municipally blessed. “We have significant advantages; we’re a compact city developed around transport hubs and we have a wealth of renewable energy sources.”
It’s true, too, that Wellingtonians are the country’s biggest supporters of public transport: 10,000 of them catch the train to work daily, and a deliberate policy of constraining greenfields expansion means that 10 percent of commuters can walk to work.
But beating anyone to green primacy is a tall order. Two-thirds of commuters still drive their cars into Wellington, congestion is worsening and fossil-fuel consumption still climbs – by eight percent between 1998 and 2004, according to the regional council, Greater Wellington.
Like Helen Clark, Prendergast knows that it’s unwise to present carbon neutrality as anything more than an unscheduled hope, because New Zealand’s emissions are high-tailing it in the other direction. We might contribute just 0.2 percent of global emissions, but our per-capita rate is the 12th-highest in the world. By 2012, we’ll have overshot our Kyoto commitment – a reduction to the 62 million tonnes we emitted in 1990 – by an estimated 36 million tonnes of extra carbon, with a price tag of $500 million.
“Central government will never admit that it’s their mistake,” says Prendergast.
So as far as she’s concerned, any reductions made now mean money in the bank. But carbon neutral and zero-carbon are two different things; Wellington’s emissions could even climb, yet it could still call itself “carbon-neutral” so long as it pays money to somebody who’s reducing theirs – more commonly called “offsetting”.
For now, the council is silent on any cuts/offsets ratio, but its own civic emissions have risen by 1000 tonnes since 2003 to around 13,000 tonnes last year.
Environmentalists – still smarting from Prendergast’s victory over the inner-city bypass – say emissions won’t come down until we crowbar people out of their cars, and they won’t be doing that so long as there are archaic trolleybuses. Wellington’s railway network is older still; dogged by delays, breakdowns and overcrowding.
Green MP Sue Kedgley: “At the moment our public transport – and I’m thinking particularly of rail – is dilapidated. Most of the infrastructure is nearly 70 years old.” She wants to see a fleet of new trolleybuses and light rail, powered by electricity from wind turbines on surrounding hills.
The mark of the council’s sincerity, she says, rests with their response to a Transit NZ study of options to solve congestion between the Ngauranga Gorge and Wellington Hospital and airport, compounded by bottlenecks at the Basin Reserve and Mt Victoria Tunnel.
“The council is pushing for a second tunnel and another road, instead of light rail. That’s the test of whether they are genuine about this vision or whether it’s just a bit of fluff.”
Roland Sapsford, a Wellington sustainability consultant, has another option: “Why don’t we just have a downtown check-in? Why can’t people check in in the central city, with a guaranteed connection out to the airport? Why does everybody have to drive or catch a taxi out there? That’s a no-brainer.”
Sapsford points to the long list of cities that left the blocks long before Al Gore fired the starting pistol of An Inconvenient Truth. “London, Woking, Portland in Oregon, Freiberg – they learnt that mobility isn’t about being able to travel further, faster. It’s about access to services.
“Sustainability doesn’t come from grand gestures or heavy engineering, it’s about working out what people’s needs are and meeting them in ways that don’t require a car.”
The council is working on the details, says Prendergast, and will release a report in September outlining options, time frames and costs. “We’ll have to show that the benefits will outweigh the costs, make a compelling case, and I think it’s there.”
That’s because carbon-neutral Wellington is in a large part a branding exercise, and she’s the first to admit it. “Yes, it’s a brand, and that can only be enhanced by marketing ourselves as a centre of environmental innovation.”
The idea is to attract corporates that want to go green. “We’ll be saying to developers, ‘We’re prepared to change the way we do business to help you establish here.’” That means fast-tracking consents, discounted fees and “maybe offering them an extra floor on their green building”.
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